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I've done a little digging and have yet to find a
satisfactory answer.

This article: 
http://developer.apple.com/internet/macosx/perl.html has
instructions for upgrading perl to 5.8.0

"OS X has one of the necessary environment variables set
(LANG), but without the above, you'll get annoying error
messages each time you try to run a script. The above
assumes the tcsh shell; if you prefer bash, use echo "export
LC_ALL=C" >> ~/.bash_profile instead."

I'll keep digging for a good answer, but I still believe
there is a bug here.  If you look in IOBinding.py, you'll
see that encoding is given a default value of "ascii".   It
should leave the section with that value intact or with
ascii replaced with the proper locale.

The possibility that getdefaultlocale will punt and return
(None, None) is not taken into account in IOBinding.py